Meta-Revision as Practice: Brahms Piano Trio in B (Op. 8), Stanislav Ioudenitch and Friends

I  no longer know at all how one composes. One instead ‘creates’ [and creates, and re-creates].”
  —  Johannes Brahms, 1855, quoted in New Groves Dictionary of Music And Musicians, 2e, Vol. 4, p. 181, Macmillan, 2001.

B  rahms could be such a good player, but he will not stop his incessant composing [and revising].”
  —  Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel, 1852, quoted in Hofmann (in Musgrave), p. 11.

Stanislav Ioudenitch (piano), Martin Storey (cello), and Ben Sayevich (violin) delivered a vibrant performance of Brahms’s ‘Piano Trio No. 1 in B’ (Op. 8, 1854 and 1891) on Friday evening in Kansas City. The motivations of the revisions that Brahms made are still the subject of vigorous scholarly debate. But even for an amateur like me, there are nuances in the 1854 verson that evoke a youthful stance, fascinating for the directness of the composer’s ‘voice’.

Such a piece, well played, imposes special demands on the performers, in terms of interpretation and recreating this voice. Ioudenitch, Storey, and Sayevich succeeded brilliantly in enabling the ambiguities in the music to come through and linger in the air and in our minds.

It seems to me that the point of revisions lies in ‘metaphoric indirection’——for the composer surely, but also for the performers and us listeners. The subjectivity in the 1854 version is ‘stubborn’——it valorizes experience, a succession of experiences. The 21 year-old Brahms did not at the time of composing Op. 8 have such a long experience, and the accretion of each experience could not help but carry more significance than a comparable experience late in life. The drama that we hear in Op. 8 is, I think, not so much that of a young Brahms finding his ‘chops’, but rather the urgency and fascination that someone who is 21 experiences in each day. Or maybe we are hearing in Op. 8 a sublimated expression of his love-life, or lack thereof?

F  or all the wealth of good reasons for loving differently, loving better, loving despite not being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable Lover.”
  —  Roland Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, 1979, p. 22.

Roger Moseley, Nick Cook, and others have compared the 1854 and 1891 versions of Op. 8, to see how musical allusions in the piece revealed Brahms’s attitudes to critics, friends, other composers. Allusions to the music of other composers are heard in the 1984 version, but the 1891 version expunged the allusive material. And in successive drafts and sketches and revisions the political aspects of the Trio became subdued.

T  here is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiance, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite ... Mistrust is called for in the face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent ... The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. No thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth.”
  —  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 25.

So Brahms was not satisfied with the 1854 version. Possibly this derived from his conflictedness over ‘absolute music’ versus ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (“future music”), and his conflictedness over his own expectations for himself as a composer. It would be good to go and read his letters from 1853 and 1854 to see what light they shed, regarding his state of mind ...

Interestingly, Moseley comments on parallels in surgical innovations by Brahms’s friend and musical ally, Theodor Billroth. According to Moseley, both Brahms and Billroth were “engaged with the removal of ‘foreign bodies’ in order to preserve organic integrity” or improve the function and its coherence/reliability/authenticity. This observation will delight musician-physicians who have not previously known of the Brahms-Billroth connection. Iatrogenic (composerly) musical bezoars as the indication for the repeated surgeries on Op. 8!

There is persistent linguistic playfulness in this Piano Trio that distinctively resists any totalization or summation of meaning. In this respect, I feel it resembles some science fiction texts that are similarly distinctive for their discontinuous sign-functions and progressive dislocations of the author and the reader, a persistent play of reorientation and inference. Ultimately, the sci-fi composer/reader/player/listener wonders about her/his emplacement, and feels a tenuousness arising from the need to continually, actively ‘construct’ the text in the process of reading/playing/hearing it. Ioudenitch’s, Sayevich’s, and Storey’s account of Op. 8 reminds me of this—an allusion to musical ideas of others and events whose urgency is exaggerated by youth; a spontaneous youthful ‘non-terminal’ identity; and a hunger for what comes next. Brahms: This is me! Is this me, really? This is my place! Is this my place, really? Where am I?

Emplacement and displacement: just as constructing ‘landscape’ is how we turn terrain into territory and territory into something knowable and then known, so emplacement is how we figure out the specifics of selfhood and human nature in a musical ‘landscape’. This is, I think, what Brahms was doing (and re-doing)——and what Ioudenitch, Sayevich, and Storey accomplished in their performance, in their brilliant ‘meta-revision’ of Op. 8: Successive revised, tenuous, intimate emplacements, leading finally to the Allegro molto agitato and a standing ovation.

• Allegro con moto
  
• Scherzo: Allegro molto
  
• Adagio non troppo
  
• Finale: Allegro molto agitato

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